The articles in this special section focus on inSAR (synthetic aperture radar interferometry) technology. This technology provides the unique ability to quantitatively map Earth’s elevation and surface deformation with high spatial resolution and precision. For this reason, it is used in many remote sensing applications (e.g., landslides, wetland water-level observation, and mining subsidence). Since

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has the unique ability to precisely measure slow surface motions, and this capability is widely used in many applications. Most of these methods were developed in the last two decades, while the increase of available SAR data in recent years has allowed the use of these approaches in various scientific and commercial projects. Based on our long experience and 16 years

Over the past two decades, the time-series interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) technique has been developed to estimate surface deformation parameters. Because of its ability to monitor large-scale deformation with millimeter accuracy, the time-series InSAR technique has been applied in many fields, such as urban infrastructure monitoring, mining subsidence, and landslides. The obtained

Ground-based differential interferometry synthetic aperture radar (GB-DInSAR) is a promising deformation measurement technology developed in the last 20 years. The GBDInSAR system is capable of sensing millimeter-scale deformations in the range of tens of meters to several kilometers from the target area in a continuous, all-weather environment. This article introduces in detail the basic principles

Ground surface deformation monitoring, parameter inversion, and forward prediction are essential to mining deformation mechanism interpretation and its related geohazard assessment. Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) has the capability to measure surface deformation in a very wide area with high spatial resolution, low cost, and high efficiency, which traditional geodetic surveying techniques

Interferometric methods are drivers of the recent exponential growth in the use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for monitoring both natural and anthropogenic hazards. Since the first use of interferometric SAR (InSAR) in the late 1990s to detect deformations associated with earthquakes and volcanoes, important developments have improved sensor performance and data-processing capabilities for the

Since 2000, interferometric synthetic-aperture radar (InSAR) has been an effective tool to map 2D water-level changes beneath vegetated wetlands with a high spatial resolution and centimetric accuracy. In the last two decades, SAR images obtained from different wavelengths and polarization modes have been tested across various wetland systems, and InSAR-derived water-level-change maps have improved

Early warning systems (EWSs) to detect and monitor landslides are a great challenge. They are important due to the high cost of catastrophic landslides and are challenging because of the difficulty in identifying a diverse range of landslide-triggering factors. While there has been a very limited number of successes, recent advances in Earth observation (EO) from the ground, aircraft, and space have

Moving into 2020 marks a number of milestones (if only based on its simplified numerology). The beginning of a new year and a new decade is always a good opportunity for retrospection, especially when progress has been made and is underway. The year 2019 marked both the last year that the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) Women in GRSS (WinGRSS) would be a committee on its own and the

The knowledge we gain from research in climate science depends on the generation, dissemination, and analysis of high-quality data. This work comprises technical practice as well as social practice, both of which are distinguished by their massive scale and global reach. As a result, the amount of data involved in climate research is growing at an unprecedented rate. Climate model intercomparison (CMIP)